The traditional process of purchasing commercial color printing can be time consuming and error-prone. This has led businesses to rely on ad agencies and graphic designers to design and buy their printed materials. Unfortunately, the expense of ad agencies and design firms has made it cost-prohibitive for businesses, especially self-employed individuals and small businesses, to purchase professional quality printed materials.
The widespread growth of PC's and desktop publishing software has made it possible for anyone to design printed materials on their PC and furnish the digital layout file to a printer. However, these users do not always have an easy way to get professional-quality printing for their files. In addition, excess production capacity (idle presses) is a chronic problem in the capital-intensive printing industry. To solve this problem, printing services have made print orders available to printing companies through a bidding system that uses request for quotations.
This bidding system is time intensive because it requires a printing company to spend time estimating more jobs than it receives. For example, a printing company may enter bids on ten jobs, but only win the bid on five jobs. Thus, the printing company wasted time entering bids on jobs it did not receive. Further, this method of obtaining work is risky because the company is forced to bid on more work than it can do; thus, when a company underestimates the number of bids it will win, it may be left with more work than it can handle, or vice versa.
The bidding process used in the printing industry is also used by many other industries where production companies compete for work. In addition, other industries have production capacity issues, where it is difficult to control the flow of work from day to day.
There is a need for a system and method of matching job orders in a specific industry, such as the printing industry, with companies having excess production capacity in that industry. Further, there is a need to make the job orders instantly available to the companies in a standard format and at a fixed price, without requiring the production companies to incur the expense of generating price quotes in an attempt to capture orders.